org.suls.blog

In the last four six months I was able to attend two very interesting conferences. First the QCon London in March and then WWDC08 in San Francisco in June. I was lucky enough to get free tickets as a student for both conferences and can't recommend it enough for any CS student. Let me describe each conference briefly:

QCon London (qcon.infoq.com)

InfoQ's QCon started off with two days of tutorials. I signed up for the Ruby/Rails combo on day one, followed by TDD with JMock on day two. The tutors (Dr Nic Williams, David Chelimsky/Aslak Hellesøy, Romilly Cocking/Steve Freeman) were all very competent and it made me wonder what uni would look like to have them as lecturers ;)
The conference itself (3 days) was mostly about Java/C# but there was room for a Functional Languages track and some Ruby as well. And yeah, I really had a chat with Mr. Gafter and was obliged to wear a Microsoft shirt (which I could switch with a O'Reilly  later on).

Apple WWDC (developer.apple.com/wwdc)

WWDC08 was mostly about the iPhone SDK and Mac OSX development in general. Since it was under NDA I don't think I can say too much.. However, I think I can go into the differences with QCon a bit. There were about 5 tracks about Testing at QCon whereas testing wasn't really mentioned at WWDC.
Also, if you're interested in the latest SE technologies you're probably better off at QCon.

However, I should mention the biggest similarity too: interesting people. It's difficult to meet more geeks anywhere else than at a geek conference ;)